[I've tried to embed ABC's video of the segment but their embed code doesn't seem to want to work. For the time being here's a bootleg YouTube embed that does actually seem to work...]

Sarah Silverman:

I cannot imagine wanting to get married right now at this time in America. And I can’t get my head around anyone – you guys were talking about it earlier… If you’re for equal rights, why would you get married right now? Why would you want to be in a club – it’s like joining a country club that doesn’t allow blacks or Jews. There’s no difference. Why would I want to join that club? It’s gross.

So until equal marriage, no marriage. Absolutely not. No way.

I don’t like feeling out of control and yet I’ve come to realise time and time again that I can’t control who I am attracted to. There’s a part of me that only wants to feel attracted to the right people. The people who are attracted in turn to me, who have some interest in me as a person, who are actually genuinely nice people. I’ve known people who have been quite horrified to know of my interest in them (and who were quite happy to vocalise this sentiment). I’ve known people who have used my feelings for them as emotional leaverage, manipulating me as they’d see fit. You just do stupid things in the presence of people who you are attracted to and who you might be in love with. You know they’re foolish when you’re doing them and at times you seem completely incapable of stopping yourself. If a confession is met with scorn, then take whatever foolishness factor you’ve been feeling and multiply it by a million. Then add two. No, really.

Then there is the relationship between sexiness and confidence. If you’re not feeling confident there’s a good chance you’re not exuding sexiness. Similarly sometimes people who are uber confident – perhaps overconfident – can seem really amazingly attractive. Even when they’re (let’s be frank) douches. Even when intellectually you know they are not nice people. Even when you suspect they drink kitten’s blood in their spare time and leave elderly people in the middle of busy highways.

Last night I was so bored that I logged into one of those awful dating websites. I had signed up more out of curiosity than anything else, and I check it out about once every six months. I was taken aback when a window popped up with a message from a local person saying something to the effect of, “Want to hook up? Ring this number.” I looked at that person’s profile and there was all this text explaining that they weren’t interested in anything except casual encounters. I was surprised by how little this appealed to me. ‘Hooking up’ with this person in particular, and ‘hooking up’ in general. I scoffed a little when (Australian Opposition Leader) Tony Abott suggested that a woman’s virginity was a gift that shouldn’t be given away lightly, and preferably not given away until marriage. But there is a part of me that really believes a sexual experience should be an expression of some emotional connection, ideally one of love. Infact in my mind if you’re just going through the experience solely for the sensation then… well a Madonna lyric (taken somewhat out of context) comes to mind: “You’ll do much better baby on your own.”

You know, it’s funny when I was working on this memoir I was writing I was secretly always looking for a moment in my life where everything would be resolved. Something that lent itself to a hopeful ending for the pretty tragic tale. And in my heart I think I was always expecting a happy ending. Infact I came to expect this so much that I would hang all my hopes on whatever new thing entered my life. Of course doing this usually meant I was a basketcase and that whatever new thing had entered my life was quickly doomed. And I would try something once and think, “Oh my god, this is so horrible. I’m never doing this again.”

And sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And sometimes a holiday romance is just that and nothing more. And if you sort of know and understand those things you can appreciate them for what they are. However if you have convinced yourself that this is your ticket out of misery and into happiness and abundance – of course you’re doomed. I guess what I understood while writing bits and pieces of the memoir was that it wasn’t really that big a deal. To a normal person it wouldn’t have been such a big deal. I think a normal person would’ve brushed themselves off, uttered something about more fish being in the sea and got on with life. Increasingly I had a sense that what had occurred wasn’t that interesting. What made it interesting to me was my very pecuilar worldview. I thought the only way the story would work would be to allow people to see inside my head. This wasn’t really about unrequited love, rather it was an epic battle for love. I didn’t think I was lovable and I was searching for some evidence to support or challenge that expectation.

I tell you all this really just to say that you never know what the moment you’re having is, or what it is going to mean in the broader artwork that is your life at large. Because it takes time to reflect on the experiences you have and contextualise them – and sometimes, recontextualise them – just to see how they go together. I have this growing sense on this my 28th birthday that some of the things I thought were gravely important were actually not. When I reflect on certain friendships that evaporated into nothingness I am amazed at how frequently those friendships were just jumping off points to other friendships with other people, more enduring, more meaningful relationships. I used to lament that horrible things had happened to me and I only had a song or a blog post or whatever to show for it. But I am starting to think that perhaps far from being a consolation prize, that perhaps the artwork was the point of the whole thing all along. Because, honestly, being drawn back to writing and painting and singing has delivered me back to my own hand with a renewed sense of who I am. Once I took all the energy I was pouring into begging for acceptance and approval and affection and put it onto the page, things improved dramatically.

It was really wonderful to hear Beth Hart lending her vocals to Slash’s contribution to the effort (I had been wondering recently what became of her).

Check out Music For Relief for more information.

This is really quite a long winded way of telling you (the readers of this particular blog) that it has been too long between posts. And I want to go into some detail as to why… Two things have preoccupied my time lately.

Firstly, I’ve been depressed. Much more depressed than I have been in a very long time. It feels like I try to play every game that life throws at me and there’s no hope in hell of winning at any of them. (They are clearly rigged!) My existential angst found a concrete place to land within my psyche. I actually don’t want to write about that much. I want to talk about that, and hopefully an opportunity will present itself sooner or later.

But then there’s been the other woman. I call this activity that because I’ve been kind of secretive about it and well she’s been taking up all my time lately. I decided I wanted to explore the visual arts. Infact I decided this many years ago but stalled. And then last year I said I wanted to paint… but I never did. I bought some sketching pencils, and then some watercolour pencils and some paintbrushes. Eventually I bought some acrylic paints and canvases and accessories. But then I had to work up the nerve to cover those canvases with paint. It was kind of intimidating, and I’m still fumbling my way around with it. I get frustrated at times that I can’t represent on the canvas what I want to represent. And it’s a whole other discipline, even compared to drawing. But I’ve really been enjoying the ride. I’ve been pouring over art books from the library, and watching all these tutorial videos on YouTube and elsewhere. It’s been exciting in a way that creating hasn’t been for me in such a long while. I think in some ways there’s a freedom that comes with dabbling in something you have no experience with. You can’t compare and contrast with other efforts, because there aren’t any! You can’t berate yourself and say, “Gah, you wrote something more convincing than that in the 7th grade!”

There is a certain physicality in the act of painting, something that I don’t find in writing. And I don’t feel like I’m restricted by conventions … because I don’t really know what they are and even if I did I don’t really have the technical capacity to follow them that closely anyway.

Anyway that’s all I have to say right now… Just wanted to say ‘hi.’ What have you been up to?

But all jokes aside, I wonder about this stuff. The differentiation between “IRL” (in real life) and Internet friendships. I wonder about the ties that bond and the ties that disintegrate into nothingness.

In truth the impetus for the trip was a romantic entanglement whose thread was so thin as to disintegrate long before it was even time to board a plane. But I decided to board that plane anyway. I wanted to put on a brave face. I wanted to see other people too. I wanted… a lot of things, I suppose. I don’t know what I was looking for but I know what I found.

There are the – at times, quite disembodied – sense of online selves. There are living, breathing people presented “in the flesh.” And then there are the entirely abstract ideas of friends and friendships. I wonder why I feel like I can be myself with some people and not with others. I wonder why sometimes thoughts manifest themselves as vocal noises and other times as words to be written or typed. I wonder why some thoughts and feelings are expressed easily and others I suppress with considerable effort.

I was disappointed and disillusioned that the romance fizzled. I was angry. I kept telling myself, “it’s okay.” But it didn’t feel okay. I kept telling myself that you can’t control who you have feelings for and who you don’t. I kept telling myself it was completely unreasonable to expect anyone to commit to a long distance relationship. And actually I believe these things are true and valid. But I still don’t appreciate being ignored for extended period of times. I didn’t appreciate being treated like yet another casual acquaintance. But I was scared to express any of these things. I was scared that if I gave my rage an outlet I had no idea where it would take me. And besides I wanted to match the indifference I was getting. I wanted to pretend I was okay. My pride felt like the only consolation I had left so I was determined to put on a good performance.

But my role in this facade was foolish. Even more foolish than I felt about the whole relationship, about coming to this city for something that wasn’t real. And if there is any ‘take home’ from this whole experience it is probably that all such falsehoods are foolish. From the big emotional ’stuff’ to just not being yourself, not speaking your mind, in much less grandiose circumstances. It extends to putting yourself in situations where you know you won’t feel comfortable. It includes going against your own values to avoid ‘making waves.’ It is about anything that mutes your truth – whatever that may be – that propels fictions ahead of personal realities.

It’s late and this feels lofty and airy-fairy. But it’s all I have. So I’ll honour it on that level.

2. Did you keep your New Years’ resolution, and will you make more for next year?
I’m not a big advocate of the New Years’ resolution generally, but last year I did confess to wanting to take on a greater support role within my little YouTube centric community. At the time I envisaged doing tutorial videos about things, but what really happened was I just answered people’s questions when they had them. I kind of feel like I have relationships with people even if I’m not constantly creating content, that they won’t necessarily forget me if I’m not always visible.

I don’t really ‘resolve’ to do anything in particular in 2010. But I’ve been wanting to paint for a really long time and I keep telling myself ‘no.’ And there’s no good reason for it. When I was in Brisbane recently I bought some Derwent Academy watercolour pencils and a sketch book and some paintbrushes and that made me more happy than I can put into words. So I think in short I want to surrender to my own desires more in 2010. I want to do art more and think about doing it less.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
Not that I know of.

4. Did anyone close to you die?
A couple of people who I did not know personally but whose work was very important to me died in 2009. Everyone is aware of the passing of Michael Jackson I’m sure. This event filled me with great sadness for a number of days but then I reflected on his work and his career. At the time I felt lucky to still have his music. And when I did eventually see the concert preparations movie it gave me a rare insight into the man himself.

And then there was the passing of that great Fortean and writer, John A. Keel. Keel was a kind of childhood hero to me. When my dissatisfaction at my office job ran highest I would read The Mothman Prophecies and Jadoo and think to myself that I was doing something very very wrong indeed. I should be out on far flung mountaintops watching UFOs and interviewing snake charmers in India. I think sometimes nothing I could say about the man could give you an insight into his character. You really have to read him for yourself. Then you experience the humour and the sincerity and intelligence and insight. He was a very special man, and a very special man to me in particular. I shall miss him dearly.

5. What countries did you visit?
I’ve never been outside of Australia. But I did travel interstate in 2009.

6. What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?
I want to be able to communicate better with others. I have this writerly scholarly sensibility that can see me explore issues in great depth and (I hope) great insight, but I still struggle to have serious face-to-face conversations with people. In addition to this I sometimes lie about how I am feeling in an effort to save face or maintain my privacy, but I’m increasingly of the opinion that this isn’t helping anyone – least of all myself.

7. What day(s) from 2009 will remain etched upon your memory?
My first trip to Brisbane, the Writer’s Festivals, winning the JVC Picsio camera in the ‘Share A Moment’ contest.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
I want to say really finding my feet with the JOJCAST.

9. What was your biggest failure?
Perhaps NaNoWriMo… but I want to say that is “an experience” and not a failure.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
After learning about the death of John A. Keel, I laid down on the couch and was sick for a month or so. It was really horrible. Especially to the extent that my recovery was so far from being a linear progression. I’d think I was getting better and then I’d feel much much worse. It was a horrible experience.

11. What was the best thing you bought?
The Best Of John Keel a book I didn’t even know existed before the man’s death. It’s a compilation of his stories that appeared in FATE Magazine. [Notable mentions go to Cynthia Harrison's Your Words, Your Story and various arts supplies too.]

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?
It has been a particular joy getting to know Jake Garrison this year. I’m thankful too for the continued patient support I receive from Michael Meloni.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?
I don’t want to name anyone. But there was one person…

14. Where did most of your money go?
Rent, Internet, Food, Travel.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
I was so stoked to win the JVC Picsio camera.

16. What song/album will always remind you of 2009?
The Asteroid’s The Golden Age.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
i. happier or sadder?
Happier.

ii. thinner or fatter?
Thinner.

iii. richer or poorer?
Poorer.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?
Making art, in a fun exploratory non-serious way.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?
Feeling miserable.

20. How will you be spending Christmas?
Well I spent Christmas with the family, at my sister’s house.

21. What was your favorite TV program?
I really enjoyed The View this year. There is just something about it. Whoopi and Joy make me laugh even on particularly horrible days.

22. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?
It’s a funny thing to realise but in the course of one year I’ve gone from not knowing someone at all, to knowing them very intimately, to cutting ties with them. I was disappointed by how things turned out. I was disappointed that I didn’t communicate how I was feeling. But I really think it was for the best…

23. What was the best book you read?
I read some great books, particularly on writing and creativity. Julia Cameron’s Walking Through This World was probably the best. But honourable mention to Anne Lammott’s Bird By Bird.

24. What was your greatest musical discovery?
I think this year I’ve been particularly fascinated by Tara Busch.

25. What did you want and get?
JVC Picsio camera, Slik tripod, French and Saunders DVD, Vicar of Dibley DVD, external hard drive… Lots of good stuff.

26. What did you want and not get?
I fell in love with the Rode Procaster microphone. Maybe when I earn some more cash…

27. What was your favorite film of this year?
The Michael Jackson film This Is It.

28. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I turned 27 on my birthday and I guess I spent it with my family… I can’t really remember. (Senile at 27?)

29. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Air conditioning!

30. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2009?
My wardrobe went quite nerdy as I bought some shirts from RedBubble – things inspired by Super Mario Brothers (and Obama), Space Invaders, Doom, and paranormal pulp fiction.

31. What kept you sane?
Slowly figuring out what I wanted. Reading and re-reading Julia Cameron’s Walking In This World. Taking walks in the bush with my iPod shuffle… Playing music, writing songs.

32. Which celebrity/public figure did you like the most?
Leslie Hall.

33. What political issue stirred you the most?
Internet censorship in Australia looks like a certainty. It is deeply frustrating. But I have been quite bemused by the talk about health care in America, the way that people see healthcare for all as a threat to capitalism (and an expression of communism). It just seems that so much of the world has already identified the need for this kind of cover for it’s people and that America, the world superpower, can’t grapple with it conceptually, let alone practically.

34. Who did you miss?
I miss David Kerr… only because we don’t chat as much as we used to. Though I am happy to say we are still good friends and do catch up from time to time.

35. Who was the best new person you met?
Michael Meloni. He’s my rock, dawg.

36. State a valuable life lesson you learned in 2009:
Trust your own intuition. You know things that you really have no good reason for knowing. You have hunches and feelings and you need to find a way to honour those because they have your back.

37. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:
“And isn’t it good;
if we could freeze moments in time we all would.
I do what I can, do what I can.”
- We Do What We Can Do, Sheryl Crow.

The end of one year is traditionally the time to start reflecting on that year and start planning for the next one. But frankly where I sit it all feels like much of the same. There’s only a couple of things I need to get done before 2009 ends, though those things are stressing me out.

And then there’s the New Year’s Resolution. You know, that ritual in which you say you’re going to do one thing or not do another, fail a couple of weeks into January and then feel terrible for the rest of the month?

Astrologer Jonathan Cainer often remarks that the beginning of the new calendar year is a terrible time, astrologically speaking, to make such bold change. I tend to think it’s a terrible time of year too. I mean most people partake in much too much alcohol on December 31st. I doubt this puts you in good standing to achieve anything that requires a great feat of willpower come January 1st.

Professor Timothy Pychyl from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, suggests it is a way of making us feel good without doing too much. In his iProcrastinate podcast, he suggests that New Year’s Resolutions can sometimes be falsely internalised aspirations because of the cultural script, the cultural expectation that you should have a New Year’s Resolution. He talks about the sheer joy you can experience just by naming your aspiration. But he also warns that without acknowledging and planning for the obstacles you’ll experience, you’re destined to fail.

Some of the things he talks about include:

• Acknowledging that you ‘won’t feel like it’ and that if it were so easily achievable, you would have achieved it already;
• Resisting the urge to ‘give in to feel good’;
• The importance of not giving up entirely even when you stumble in the short term;
• Setting up ‘implementation strategies’ (how you will achieve your outcome);
• Fitting your goal into your life using the ‘un-schedule’ (when you will work on your outcome);
• Don’t put off the actions you need to take. Don’t wait for the ‘New Year’ – just get started (now)!

I strongly suggest you check out the podcast episode. It’s a take on resolutions quite unlike any I had heard before.

A boy, when asked to draw something that reminded him of Christmas, draws a stick figure character (apparently) of Jesus Christ. The boy is promptly sent home and sent off for psychological evaluation. It was a reaction that had even some of my atheist friends crying “overkill.” Was this political correctness gone mad? An extreme action to enforce some sort of separation between church and state? An appropriate response from a concerned teacher (in a nation with a particular history of school shootings)?

Who knows… Infact the more you dig into the story, the more confusing it becomes. But what interests me here is religion and it’s symbols. It is one thing to associate Jesus with Christmas, but why the crucifix? I mean, don’t misunderstand me; the cross is an important part of the Jesus story. It is symbolic of the sacrifice God made obtensibly on behalf of all of humanity. But it is the domain of the Easter story. Christmas is more concerned with baby Jesus, the immaculate virgin birth.

Or is it?

Clay Nelson on Christmas, Theologies and Billboards:

To make the news at Christmas it seems a priest just has to question the ‘literal-ness’ of a virgin giving birth. Many in society mistakenly think that to challenge literalism is to challenge the norms of Christianity. What progressive interpretations try to do, however, is to remove the supernatural fluff and delve into the deeper spiritual truth of this festival. Christian fundamentalism believes a supernatural male God who lived above sent his sperm into the womb of the virgin Mary. Although there were a series of miraculous events surrounding Jesus’ birth – like wandering stars and angelic choirs – the real miracle was his death and ressurrection 33 years later.

In the Fortean Times 1993 Diary, compiled by Paul Sieveking and Val Stevenson, there is an interesting note on the 21st January (incidentally my own birthday). It reads:

The day of St. Agnes, patron saint of sheep. She is probably the Roman-Jewish version of Agna, an incarnation of the Ewe goddess Rachel. Like the Virgin Mary, she came from ‘immaculate’ parents. In spite of being pre-Christian, not to mention closely connected with sacred prostitutes, her relics are preserved in Rome and constantly adored by the faithful. Unfortunately for her credibility, Agnes is said to have been martyred in the reign of Constantine – when Christians were not persecuted.

Two thoughts occur to me. Just how rare were ‘immaculate’ births; and how problematic such tales must be if we cannot confirm the circumstances of a person’s death (what with dying – unlike immaculate conception – being an observed and documented phenomena)?

Of course these things are just the tip of a much more problematic iceberg. It is the kind of iceberg that Clay Nelson alludes to. It is this underlying conflict between literalism and non-literal readings of texts within the same traditions. Even listening to Nelson’s sermon for the first time I wondered why some sections were (as he puts it) “supernatural fluff” and others were “miraculous.”

Increasingly I encounter religious proponents who stress the importance of not taking religious texts so literally. Take for example Brian McLaren’s take on the Book of Relevation:

My background, before becoming a pastor, I was a college English teacher, so my background was literature, and that’s been something of an advantage to me in approaching the Biblical text because when you study literature, one of the first questions you ask is ‘What’s the genre of this piece of literature’ and the Book of Revelation is in the genre of Jewish apocalyptic literature. We had dozens of examples of this genre from about the 2nd century BC to the 1st and 2nd century AD, and when you put the Book of Revelation back into that genre, just like putting Jesus back in a setting, you put that document back in a setting, you read it completely differently. It stops being a prediction about the end of the world and it becomes a way to talk about what was going on at that moment.

Now there are two theories about the Book of Revelation. One is that it was written in the 60s and the other in the 90s, but either way it was written under a period of intense persecution of Christians by the Roman Emperor, and they were being killed and brutally persecuted and blamed for all kinds of things. And under that regime, the Book of Revelation says ‘Don’t give up hope, don’t give up your faith, in the end it will triumph.’ But it uses subversive language to do that, and what’s happened is, without being aware of the rules of the genre, people have interpreted it to say all kinds of outrageous things.

Genre and historical context should help with understanding religious texts, but I suspect where these things aren’t known to the reader, the meaning becomes a very open ended thing. This is what it says, and this is what it means.

I am reminded of a musician and composer I once worked for. She had released an album of mostly improvised piano pieces. She was set to play one on live television. “Is that how long it goes for?” a segment producer asked. She answered the question with yet another question. “How long do you want it to be?”

Merry Christmas!

I disappear into the escarpment and leave the canine tension behind me. I fumble with my iPod, and find some Kate Bush. And So Is Love starts filling my ears. I realise the song touches an exposed nerve. My stroll becomes something else entirely. I keep walking faster and faster, as though I was fleeing from some invisible foe. But the only foe I fear is myself, is what I am feeling. How I wish to be feeling anything but what I am feeling. I hold the emotion with more contempt than the uncertainty and circumstances from which it was borne. I guess I thought with enough food and activity and mind numbing television I could suppress my emotions.

The truth is I’m confused. I reached out to someone and there was no response whatsoever. I reached out some more. Still nothing. I decided that perhaps the situation called for some space, so I stopped reaching out. I don’t know why this is happening. I’m notorious for letting my imagination get the better of me as I hallucinate untold horrors. I’m trying to be less reactive. I’m trying to be more understanding. I am trying to give people the benefit of the considerable doubt. I don’t have enough information to reach an informed conclusion, so I wait… But by the same time I don’t want to make my happiness dependant on a resolution.

I looked out from a lookout onto the curve of the Shoalhaven River. The final glimpses of daylight were poking through cloud and hitting the water. An army of trees were standing seemingly at attention to observe the end of the day. I was struck by the beauty of it. I didn’t want to see the beauty of it, actually. I was too involved in my own barely articulated sorrow. I was reminded of the Wendy Matthews song The Day You Went Away, and how the singer was surprised to see that the weather was oblivious to her own personal tragedy. And of course the weather, the bushland, all of it was also oblivious to mine as well. With Kate Bush filling my ears, I clutched the railing over the lookout and just tried to breathe. “Just being alive,” Bush sings, “it can really hurt. These moments given are a gift from time.”

That song ends and I continue on foot. This man made corridor between bush and fenced off cliff ledge, a corridor I know well. (I say this, but of course there’s always one protruding tree root that I seem to trip over. Often within view of other bushwalkers.) It is getting darker all the time and suddenly the bridge of The Song Of Solomon descends upon me. But it sounds slightly different, somehow more ominous and explosive and expressive. Of course it isn’t just the contents of my iPod that reach my ears but a cacophony of White Cockatoos screeching in sympathy. There’s no way they could hear the music and yet they seem to die down when the music does. They are little more than specks of white darting in and out of dark stately trees.

And then there’s Lily and The Red Shoes. The light is fading quickly, but I am determined to make it to the river. I bound down the steps fashioned out of large sandstone, though before The Red Shoes is over the red light on my iPod starts flashing. It’s out of charge. I throw it into my pocket and continue towards the water. Now my only company on this walk are my thoughts and my surrounds. I’m not sure what I feel. I’m not sure how I want to feel, indeed how much I want to allow myself to feel. I want to honour what I’m feeling but not let how I’m feeling dictate how my life should be or inform my own personal sense of identity. There was a time I would’ve taken any ’snub’ – real or imagined – and used it as a starting point to beat myself up. Clearly I am a horrible, hopeless, fundamentally unlovable person. But frankly I could no longer see the point. Whatever my features and failings, vices and virtues, I am stuck with myself for the duration. All beating myself up results in is me feeling horrible. And I haven’t done anything wrong, if anything I’ve been earnest and accommodating. But I am lonely and I am confused, and a little sad.

As I sit here reflecting on this walk, I continue to listen to that same Kate Bush album, picking up from where my iPod left off when it ran out of charge. I take some comfort actually in the opening lines of Why Should I Love You:

This chapter says put it out of your mind
And give it time

So that’s what I shall attempt to do now. Thanks for indulging me.